This article investigates the behavior of the term structure of interest rates over the business cycle. In contrast to prior studies that measure the business cycle by the simple growth in aggregate economic activity, the authors consider the deviation of aggregate economic activity from its potentially stochastic trend. They show that incorporating both an independent trend and cyclical component in consumption improves the efficiency in estimating consumption-based asset pricing models. The authors also find that the term spread is more informative about future changes in stochastically detrended real gross domestic product (GDP) than future growth rates in real GDP.

This paper investigates the behavior of the term structure of interest rates over the business cycle. In contrast to the simple change in aggregate economic activity used in previous research, we use a more appropiate measure of the business cycle: the deviation of aggregate economic activity from its potentially stochastic trend. Stochastically detrending Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by Watson's [1986] UC-ARMA methodology significantly improves the term spread's informativeness regarding future economic activity. We also investigage the implications of the UC-ARIMA representation of aggregate consumption dynamics for a linear consumption based model of the term structure. The presence of an unobserved by independent cyclical component in aggregate consumption also allows for the more efficient estimation of consumption asset pricing models.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the behavior of the term structure of interest rates over the business cycle. In contrast to prior studies that measure the business cycle by the simple growth in aggregate economic activity, we consider the deviation of aggregate economic activity from its potentially stochastic trend. We show that incorporating both an independent trend and cyclical component in consumption improves the efficiency in estimating consumption‐based asset pricing models. We also find that the term spread is more informative about future changes in stochastically detrended real gross domestic product (GDP) than future growth rates in real GDP.